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Monday, 16 March 2009

If I ever meet Sir Paul McCartney

Many years ago one of the mobile phone companies had a series of ads were famous-ish people said who they would like to have a one-to-one with and why. Inevitably their choices veered to the pretentious (no prizes for guessing Martin Luther King was one of them).

Well, I'd like a one-to-one with Sir Paul McCartney. And what I'd like to ask is what was going through his mind when he allowed the phrase 'this world in which we live in,' into the theme song to the Bond movie Live and Let Die.

I mean, world in which we live in???

Every time I hear this, I want to cringe and simultaneously throw my shoes at the source of this illiterate guff. The really silly thing is that he could have left out either of those offending 'in's without spoiling the scansion, just by extending a word to a second note. So either 'wor-ld which we live in' or 'world in which we li-ive.' But no.

It's like you say, Brian. He's an illiterate guff. But, oh, how he made my heart quiver when I was a kid. He was my favorite Beatle, so he could have mixed metaphors and sung with a plethora of adverbs, and this young kid would have forgiven him for every one of those literary travesties. Swoooon...

Written by

Author of Science for Life,The Quantum Age, Final Frontier, Dice World, Gravity, The Universe Inside You, Build Your Own Time Machine, Inflight Science, A Brief History of Infinity, The God Effect and more, Brian spends most of his time these days writing popular science books and giving talks.